Online Properties
Your online properties need to be owned by you, even if you did not set them up and do not manage them. In this article we will do a quick run down of the important online properties. As a general rule, if it associated with your business, you need to own the online property. Of the most important are the various Google properties. Although your business may be a hunting outfitter or a fishing lodge, like any business, your online presence is vital to your success.
Why Should You Own
Reason number 1 is simply for control of your assets. Your online properties are key to your marketing success. Own your assets. If you have contracted an agency to run your website or to manage your online marketing (an agency such as Netnotic Marketing) they will likely set up a number of Google Properties and other online properties on your behalf. That's OK, but you need to ensure in the contracts you have with them, that they also provide you ownership of those accounts. Most online accounts will have one owner, and can have several other administrators. You should be the owner, your consultants should be administrators. Reason number 2 is for future changes. If you ever need to switch consultants, you can simple remove the admin accounts of the previous and invite the new ones.
Your Website Accounts
There are two primary accounts associated with your website, your domain name registration and your website hosting account. Often these are bundled together by the provider. The domain name registration account is the ownership of the actual website address, such as www.netnotic.com. There will be an annual renewal fee for this, typically somewhere between $15 and $30. Your website hosting account is the server space where your website files physically reside. There will be an annual renewal fee for this as well, typically between $100 and $300 for the size of account that most outfitters and lodges will require. Often these are bundled into one price. Depending on who you are working with, you may need to pay extra for an SSL certificate (a necessary security element) as well as email addresses with the domain name (often there are a limited number of these for free with hosting accounts).
Google Properties
The array of Google Properties described below might seem a bit overwhelming, but there is a role that each play in your online efforts. We will cover each briefly.
Google Analytics
This is free traffic tracking and analysis reporting from Google. The data available in Google Analytics is extremely valuable to your Marketing efforts if used properly. This is usually the first google property a web developer will add and can be the "key source of truth" for your online Marketing efforts. Not essential that you are intimately familiar with all the reports and data, but your webmaster and your digital Marketing agency should be.
Google Tag Manager
This is a tricky one to explain. Think of this as a container that tells the various Google Properties what information to pass from the website and to each other as well as the rules for when data should be passed. It was created by Google to remove the extremely tedious and often perplexing need to add little snippets of code all over your website just so that you can keep track of key happenings on your website. Here's a simple example. In Google Tag Manager, we add the Google Analytics account ID where we are going to store all the website traffic data. Then we use Google Tag Manager to send some data to Google Analytics each time one of the things we deem to be important occurs, such as each time someone clicks on your phone number on the website. Tag Manager sends this data to Google Analytics, along with a whole bunch of other data, and we are able to see reports that tell us how many times this "event" has happened, how the user got you website (from social, from organic search, from an ad), and a bunch of other valuable data. Tag Manager is the middle man between your website and Google Analytics.
Google Search Console
This is utility running on the sidelines for you that gathers valuable diagnostic information. When this property is set up, it does some traffic analysis but also provides details on your website, such as what pages of your website are indexed by Google search and possible reasons why they are not. As well, this utility reports on the number and source of links that point to your website. A valuable data source for your SEO consultant. Using Google Search Console is also regarded as the initial way you tell Google that your website exists.
Google Business Profile
This is an under utilized Google Property but essential for anyone who operates a local business. As an outfitter or lodge, you might think you are not really a "local" business, which is mostly true. But Google Business Profile is also the resource for Google Reviews.
Google Ads
If you are prepared to spend money on online advertising, then Google Ads is where you should start first. We have written several articles on the effectiveness of Google Ads When you run Google Ads, it is likely that your credit card is going to be set up in the payment profile. This should be enough reason to ensure that you have ownership of the account.
YouTube
Not everyone knows this, but Google owns YouTube, and Google and YouTube love each other. Videos are a powerful media and as such, your ownership of the channel is both so that you can gain all the good that can come from posting good videos as well as you can remove any video content that is not positive. Just a side note, if you looking for a way to differentiate yourself from your competitors, ask us about how to maximize exposure on YouTube.
Social Accounts
Similar to all the other online properties and accounts, no different for your social accounts. You might have a marketing firm or one of your employees looking after the postings and handling interactions on the social channels, but these are your social channels. As a business owner, it is essential that you can "shut off" the social channel if something goes the wrong way. It's also important that you can remove and re-assign access as employees come and go.
Summary
If you haven't got the main point of this article yet, it is simple, own your online assets. We have worked with a few outfitter and lodges who have fallen out of touch with their webmasters and/or marketing consultants and then did not have access to any of the online properties. The most dangerous of course is the website domain name registration account. Not having control of these can mean a costly lesson and the expense of starting over from some point. Another less severe example, in the case of losing your Google Analytics account, you may lose access to all your years of historical data. This data is important especially as a year over year comparison of your website stats. Are you growing? Are you reaching more potential clients? What Marketing activities are generating a positive return on your investment.
Own your online assets!
If you have any questions?
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